By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos
Passover, glazed donuts, and graduate school do not mix well. This is a fact that I encountered, for five consecutive years, while laboring on my doctoral degree. Full appreciation of this physical law requires some background, so please bear with me for a paragraph or two.
Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is the Jewish week-long holiday celebrating the Biblical Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. There is a ceremonial dinner, called the Passover Seder, that begins the holiday week and introduces the observance of the ritual laws surrounding this holiday, and central among these ritual laws is a strict prohibition from eating leavened foods. You may remember the story that the Israelites did not have time to let their dough rise before hitting the highway, and so Jews all around the world clear their homes of any bread for the week. In fact, it is prohibited to even have flour, grain alcohol, etc. and in some traditions even legumes and rice, at home. The only grain product allowable during this week is matzo, a cracker-like, flat unleavened bread especially made not to become light and fluffy regardless of what we do to it. While growing up our family hardly ever went to synagogue; nevertheless, we were pretty strict about keeping to the Passover laws, and I still remember the vigorous spring-cleaning we were commanded to perform (by Mom, not God) each year during the week before Passover.
Even in college, away from the inspecting eyes of my parents, I “kept Pesach,” and ate my share of matzo sandwiches, matzo and eggs, matzo pizza, and matzo lasagna, the last item exactly as appetizing as it sounds. I wistfully remember the end of Passover during my sophomore year, when my (soon-to-dump-me) girlfriend and I romantically waited for the sun to set over Troy, NY, so we could eat a most delicious (real) pizza.
Graduate school was no different, and here is where the glazed donuts come in. Every Wednesday afternoon, our research group would meet to listen to an invited speaker and, as the universal incentive for graduate students to attend an event, the group would serve coffee and glazed donuts. On the Wednesday during Passover, I would enter the room aware of the Dunkin Donut boxes opened temptingly with its beguiling potential sacrilege, but I was resolute not to succumb this year. How can it be that five years in a row, while vigorously arguing with a colleague about some detail regarding non-linear spectral estimation, I would absentmindedly reach over the conference table and pop a glazed donut into my mouth? There is no worse torture to one’s inner soul than having a glazed donut melt in your mouth while you know that, up in heaven, Father Moses is stroking his beard and shaking his head reprovingly, disappointed yet again. Moreover, one cannot enjoy the morsel after having so diligently avoided such things all week, but neither can one run to the bathroom with a donut hanging from your lips. One must swallow resignedly, another year of strict “keeping Pesach” forsaken.
But overall, I have to admit, Passover has been very good to me. Next week will be the fortieth anniversary of my meeting my wife at a Seder, and marriage itself has brought with it many advantages relative to the holiday; watching our three sons participate in the seder, whether decorating placemats for the table, reading part of the liturgy, or acting out the story of Passover for our guests. It has also meant a much better menu of Passover meals, someone to share the task of doing all that ritual spring-cleaning, and much, much less reliance on glazed donuts for basic nutrition.
The traditional Jewish life is filled with many, many commandments that at first seem orthogonal to living an ethical life; what to eat or not eat at different times, when to rest, what to wear; rituals that seem obsessive and antiquated, often irrelevant to our modern life or to leading a virtuous one. However, I don’t feel that way at all.
Editor’s note: David Izraelevitz first submitted this Passover column 10 years ago today and it was published in the Los Alamos Daily Post.
